Various document sharing environments support multiple editing sessions over a single document with the versioning and updates being handled by technologies in the sharing environment. Such sharing environments often implement some mechanism to provide a visual representation (e.g., a thumbnail or icon) and/or a limited access view (e.g., a preview copy) of the document. In legacy cases such a visual representation is merely a static icon (e.g., a PDF icon or a Microsoft WORD icon). Some sharing environments present a visual indication in the form of a tiny, yet distinguishably accurate representation of the file or object being edited. In some situations such a distinguishably accurate representation might be scalable (e.g., using a scalable vector graphic (SVG)) representation in the form of an icon or in the form of a read-only preview. Such legacy techniques serve a limited set of purposes, yet such limitations become onerous in the context of file sharing. Techniques are needed to improve the application and efficacy of various technologies as compared with the legacy approaches.